Significant broadband policy continues to take shape: the Save the Internet Act advanced to the full House Committee on Energy & Commerce, the Federal Trade Commission launched a study into the privacy practices of internet service providers, and the Federal Communications Commission circulated a proposal to cap the Universal Service Fund. We take a look at what you may have missed this week.

C Spire and T-Mobile have been duking it out in dueling letters to the Federal Communications Commission concerning T-Mobile rural plans which, according to T-Mobile, are contingent on its planned merger with Sprint being approved by regulators. T-Mobile has said it would broadly expand fixed wireless service to rural areas if it obtains Sprint’s vast spectrum holdings. But C Spire and the Rural Wireless Association questioned the viability of those plans in a letter to the FCC, expressing concern about whether T-Mobile would have sufficient high-speed backhaul capacity to support those plans.

I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators. By updating the rules for the Internet, we can preserve what’s best about it — the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things — while also protecting society from broader harms. From what I’ve learned, I believe we need new regulation in four areas: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.

• Harmful content: Internet companies should be accountable for enforcing standards on harmful content. It’s impossible to remove all harmful content from the Internet, but when people use dozens of different sharing services — all with their own policies and processes — we need a more standardized approach.
• Protecting elections: Deciding whether an ad is political isn’t always straightforward. Our systems would be more effective if regulation created common standards for verifying political actors.
• Effective privacy and data protection needs a globally harmonized framework: I believe it would be good for the Internet if more countries adopted regulation, such as the European Union's European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, as a common framework.
• Data portability: If you share data with one service, you should be able to move it to another. This gives people choice and enables developers to innovate and compete.

[Mark Zuckerberg is founder and chief executive of Facebook.]

Before the Department of Housing and Urban Development on March 28 announced that it has charged Facebook with violating the Fair Housing Act by enabling advertisers to engage in housing discrimination, Facebook said that it would change its ad-targeting methods to forbid discriminatory advertisements about housing, employment and credit opportunities. This plan, announced the week of March 18, is part of its settlement agreement with the civil rights groups that filed suits against the company over the past few years. The substantive terms are not radical. But they outline a basic framework for how policymakers might begin thinking about reforming big tech in ways that are suited to our times.

But, the reforms embodied in the settlement are hardly enough. First, even if Facebook substantially narrows the scope of targeting, there is no reason to believe that its algorithms might not revert to discriminatory ad distribution patterns. Also, Facebook does not have to be transparent about the actual workings of its algorithms. Despite these limitations, there is much in the settlement that is worth applauding. At a minimum, it sets out the blueprint for how to regulate big tech going forward. The other important lesson from the settlement is not about any of its specific terms. It is that policymakers should ensure that Facebook and other big tech companies continue to contemplate the real threat of litigation. The lawyers who represented plaintiffs filed complaints that plausibly forced Facebook to revamp its powerful advertising business model. But this is a rare case. Narrowing the scope of protection under the Communications Decency Act would help to make sure that Facebook and influential companies like it are beholden to the laws that protect the most vulnerable among us, or at least stay vigilant to the cause. Details for such reform are not easy to sort out. This settlement is a good start.